Sunday, October 23, 2016

Elon Musk Details His Vision Of Life On Mars

Space X founder answers questions on Reddit.

Space X founder and CEO Elon Musk gave more details about plans to colonize Mars on Sunday during an AMA session on Reddit.

Musk’s ambitious plans, laid out last month at an international space conference in Mexico, include using reusable rockets to launch a fleet of spaceships to establish a base on the Red Plant, creating a colony with 1 million people over the course of 100 years. Musk hopes to launch an unmanned mission as soon as 2018, and a manned mission in 2024.

On Sunday, Musk said the first manned mission, with about a dozen people, would create a base and set up a propellant plant for refueling. His envisions Mars settlers living in glass-and-carbon-fiber geodesic domes, with robots to assist with mining and tunnelling. Musk said he hopes to give more details in “a year or two,” after “actual live lock-ups” have been built.

Musk also answered a number of technical questions about the so-called Interplanetary Transport System, such as the maximum g’s for the spacecraft (5 g’s normally, but able to withstand two to three times that); comparisons of the massive planned rocket to the current Falcon 9 (“it won’t come in quite as hot and fast as Falcon”); and the project’s next biggest task (creating “a new metal alloy that is extremely resistant to oxidation for the hot oxygen-rich turbopump”).

Musk also said he doesn’t like the ITS moniker: “I think we need a new name. ITS just isn’t working. I’m using BFR and BFS for the rocket and spaceship, which is fine internally, but...”